Legacy Control System Migration

Legacy Control System Migration is, or at some point will be, a very important topic for every manufacturing facility. According to recent statistics, $65 billion worth of installed legacy process control systems have reached the end of their reasonable life cycle. Many companies do not have the financial resources to perform a complete replacement of equipment or the technical resources to develop a strategy for migration and replacement to more current technologies.

Cost-Effective Migration Strategy

Cross Company has proven experience in migrating legacy hardware and software systems. Our proven process begins with a risk analysis and site review and discussion with our customer to discuss the end goals and critical aspects of each application. We have the knowledge and expertise to extract the critical information from the existing configurations, graphics, and documentation and even your experienced operations and engineering personnel, a critical area of knowledge often overlooked.

Based on this assessment, we guide our customers through specific recommendations on a migration path best suited for your requirements to minimize cost, risk, and associated downtime.

From a simple HMI upgrade to a GMP validated system and even development of a five to ten-year migration plan for an entire facility, Cross Company can provide complete planning, engineering and commissioning to guide you through this process to successfully achieve your migration and business objectives.

Supported Platforms

Cross Company has successfully performed upgrades to current supported platforms from the following legacy systems.

Hardware Platforms:

ABB Mod 30 Mod 300

Allen Bradley SLC 500, PLC2, PLC5

GE FANUC, 9030, 9070, PAC Systems RS3i

Honeywell UDC 2500, 3200, 3500

Siemens Moore APACS, S5, S7, TI 505

Sixnet EtherTRAK, VersaTRAK RTU’s

Square D PLC's

Fisher Provox S10 and S20 series IO

Bailey Net 90 and INFI 90

Foxboro SPECTRUM or SPEC 200

Rosemount RS3

Virtually any other brand of PLC/DCS

Software Platforms:

Wonderware

Iconics

Citect

Factory Link

Cimplicity

Indusoft

Fix 32 and IFIX

RSView 32 and legacy Panelviews

Proprietary and Visual Basic HMI’s

An Introduction to System Legacy Migration

Because the associated consequences are so severe, we can all be grateful that the concept of Legacy Migration is very simple. Legacy migration is a process in which obsolete control system hardware and software are upgraded to maintain the current standards – simply, the current technology – so that you can continue to run your facility with a mitigated risk of failure.

Process Control System Integration Blog Posts

Siemens announced the start of the “cancellation” phase of APACS products in 2011. If you still have APACS hardware running your plant, then there’s a good chance that you’ve started looking at migration options and Siemens recommends the SIMATIC PCS 7 line of controllers and remote I/O.

Since Siemens acquired Moore Products in 2000, they have dutifully supplied the hardware for the very popular APACS Control System. However, APACS was announced “mature” in 2010 with planned support running through September 2020. The support will not abruptly end on October 1, 2020, but it will not be guaranteed past that date.